New Brunswick. 1988. Rutgers University Press. 1st Edition. Very Good in

New Brunswick. 1988. Rutgers University Press. 1st Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0813513006. 398 pages. hardcover. Jacket and book design: Liz Schweber. keywords: Latin America Brazil Women Sociology. DESCRIPTION-In this powerful oral history, Daphne Patai evokes the rich and varied lives of Brazilian women. Twenty of them tell their own life stories-women in city and country, in comfort and poverty, and in rebellion and resignation. These stories illuminate ordinary ‘invisible' women from many different walks of life: domestic servants, secretaries, factory workers, nuns, hairdressers, entrepreneurs, seamstresses, prostitutes, landowners, schoolgirls, homemakers, revolutionaries; single, married, widowed, and divorced; Black and White and in between. Patai conducted these interviews in two contrasting regions-cosmopolitan Rio de Janeiro and the more traditional, largely agrarian Northeast. Translated from the Portuguese in vivid, direct, compelling language, the twenty stories convey the feel of contemporary Brazil as experienced by women whose everyday existence and dreams have until now gone almost entirely unrecorded. Through these life stories, we gain a sense of the opportunities and constraints that structure women's lives in Brazil. Patai shows us a reality markedly at odds with that projected through the lens of conventional social analysis. It is a women's reality that speaks from this oral history, one in which traditional cultural assumptions take on new and unsettling meanings and force a reexamination of conventional views of the norms and values of Brazilian life. When these interviews took place, Brazil was in the last years of its long military dictatorship. Patai provides extensive notes to relate the individual lives to the political and economic changes of Brazil, and to corroborate and contrast the women's particular views with information about legal status, health conditions, education, feminist and Black activism, the practice of liberation theology, Afro-Brazilian cults, and the fluctuations of women's economic position. They are not impersonal facts, however, but rather real women who speak most forcefully in this book. Their self-portraits, brought to life in strong and often eloquent voices, throw a new, and even a glaring light on a country, a time, and above all on a profound transformation in women's consciousness. inventory #12165.